Hallstatt, Austria · Europe

5 ideal things to do in Hallstatt

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked September 3, 2026

1. 01

   Salzwelten Hallstatt, the oldest salt mine in the world

   The high valley above the village, up by funicular·May to early November; take the first car up

   Europe's oldest wooden staircase is down there, cut in 1344 BC and preserved by the salt that buried it. You are issued a boiler suit, sent down a miners' slide into the workings and brought out on a mine train. Before any of that, the Skywalk platform hangs out over the valley with the lake directly below — ten minutes of standing still, well spent. I took the slide badly and was photographed doing it, which is evidently the business model.

2. 02

   The Beinhaus and its painted skulls

   St Michael's Chapel, beside the parish church above the village·Any morning; it is a small room and it fills fast

   In a chapel roughly the size of a garage sit around twelve hundred skulls, six hundred and ten of them hand-painted with the name of the dead and a wreath — ivy for life, oak for glory, roses for love. The cemetery was too small, so graves were reused and the bones came here. The painting began about 1720 and the most recent skull was added in 1995, at the woman's own request. Nobody here is being macabre. They simply ran out of ground.

3. 03

   The 5fingers platform on Krippenstein

   Above Obertraun, by cable car from across the lake·Summer season, early, before the cloud settles on the plateau

   A cable car out of Obertraun lifts you onto the Dachstein plateau where five steel walkways project over a five-hundred-metre drop: one floored in glass, one framing the valley through a Baroque picture frame, all of them entirely unnecessary and completely worth it. The Giant Ice Cave is on the same mountain and keeps its ice through the summer. I stood on the glass one for four seconds and then walked back along a solid one, having made my point.

4. 04

   The loop around Vorderer Gosausee

   Gosau valley, about twenty minutes west·Windless mornings, May to October, for the reflection

   Twenty minutes west of the crowd sits a lake with a four-kilometre path around it and the Dachstein glacier standing at the far end, and on a still morning the whole mountain turns up upside-down in the water. The circuit is flat and takes about an hour. On my last time round I passed nine people. Hallstatt takes eleven thousand a day in season, and the mountains in between did not agree to either figure.

5. 05

   Arrive by train and cross the lake on the ferry

   Hallstatt Bahnhof, east shore — the boat meets the trains·Year-round; the last crossing back is early evening

   Hallstatt's railway station is on the wrong side of the lake with no road from it to the village, which sounds like a planning failure and is in fact the best arrival in Austria. A small boat meets each train, takes about fifteen minutes, and the village assembles itself in front of you exactly as it does in the photographs, except moving. Bring cash for the crossing. I found that out in the tedious way, at the ticket window, in the rain.